DeWine and Rove say Biden won. Other Republicans are edging in that direction.
It’s not exactly a stampede, but the number of Republicans willing to acknowledge President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory is growing, with Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio and the veteran party operative Karl Rove, who served as an adviser to the Trump campaign, urging the president to accept defeat.
While only four sitting senators in the president’s party have publicly congratulated Mr. Biden, other Republicans are creeping gingerly in that direction, and Republican state elections officials are pushing back against the Trump campaign’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
“We need to consider the former vice president as the president-elect. Joe Biden is the president-elect,” Mr. DeWine told CNN on Thursday.
Earlier this week, the governor — who represents a one-time tossup state that has swung decisively for President Trump twice — had signaled that he wanted to wait for Mr. Trump’s legal challenges to be adjudicated before going all the way.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Rove, a ferocious partisan fighter who was a key player in President George W. Bush’s campaigns, wrote an op-ed for The Wall St. Journal, “This Election Result Won’t Be Overturned,” pointing out that recounts often change hundreds but seldom tens of thousands of votes, and never in the multiple states that Mr. Trump would need to overturn to claim victory.
“The president’s efforts are unlikely to move a single state from Mr. Biden’s column, and certainly they’re not enough to change the final outcome,” wrote Mr. Rove, who provided strategic advice to Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale and others close to the president.
Two powerful forces are preventing more Republicans from immediately following suit.
First is fear of Mr. Trump, who refuses to concede and threatens defectors. And second is the more acute factor of the double runoff in January for Georgia’s two Senate seats, which will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will require near-maximum turnout from the Republican faithful, and they are very firmly behind Mr. Trump’s post-election resistance movement.
Though most leading Republicans have not repeated Mr. Trump’s fraud claims, they have also declined to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory — which could further embolden Mr. Trump, who refused to commit to the peaceful transition of power during the campaign and undermined confidence in any results that did not favor him.
Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by more than 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, more than 50,000 in Pennsylvania and nearly 150,000 in Michigan, all states that have already been called for him, though Mr. Trump is pressing legal challenges. Mr. Biden also leads by more than 10,000 votes in the uncalled states of Georgia and Arizona, though he does not need either one now that he is president-elect.
And there were signs that the president’s Red Wall on Capitol Hill might be more of a temporary barrier than a permanent political bulwark.
Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, told a radio station in his home state on Wednesday that he would intervene as soon as Friday if the Trump administration continued to refuse to grant Mr. Biden access to presidential daily intelligence briefings.
“There is no loss from him getting the briefings and to be able to do that,” Mr. Lankford, who sits on the Senate Oversight Committee, told radio station KRMG.
The first-term senator added that doing so would ensure continuity of governance “if Joe Biden is elected, which it looks like he is.”
On Thursday, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the longest serving Republican in the Senate, told CNN he thought Mr. Biden should be in the loop. “I would think — especially on classified briefings — the answer is yes,” he said.
At least two other Republican senators, Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Marco Rubio of Florida, have suggested Mr. Biden should have access to the briefings, although neither went as far as Mr. Lankford.
As of Thursday, the Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had publicly acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory. A fifth, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, called Mr. Biden “quite likely” to prevail and urged Mr. Trump to cooperate.
On Wednesday, Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, told Fox News that state officials had received about 1,000 complaints about the election but found “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud.
“If indeed there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work,” he said.
Mr. Brnovich stopped short of declaring a winner, and it is not within his official responsibilities to do so anyway.
Still, he added, “It does appear that Joe Biden will win Arizona.”